Quitting the Common Core?

Savannah Wojtaszek of Jackson completes a problem on a Promethean ActivBoard, an interactive whiteboard system, during a seventh grade math class at Christa McAuliffe Middle School, among New Jersey schools rolling out Common Core standards. Staff photo Tanya Breen

Oklahoma and South Carolina opted out of the Common Core State Standards in recent weeks, reflecting how politicians have once again taken the reins of education out of the hands of educators. Politicians opted states in, and now they’re starting to opt states out.

The mission behind the Common Core adoption is commendable – to increase academic rigor for students and help them better compete in a global brain race. American students are losing that race, for the most part.

But teachers have become increasingly disturbed by flaws in testing used to measure the success of Common Core, and parents are worried the new standards are confusing students more than speeding up the learning process.

Granted, learning is a process. Most processes, especially ones that affect millions of people, take time to deliver measurable results.

In a country devoted to instant gratification, are politicians waiting long enough for kinks in a new system to be worked through before they abandon Common Core entirely?

Is quitting the Common Core sending an important message – that we Americans quit something that’s too difficult. Or, we change the rules of the game to fit our desires.

Ignoring the flaws with the Common Core and political arguments on either side, South Carolina and Oklahoma have done just that.

Many South Carolina schools are in need of a serious educational push. Only 75 percent of high school seniors in that state graduated within four years in the 2011-2012 school year, five percentage points below the rest of the nation, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Oklahoma did not provide its graduation figures to the federal Department of Education’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Indiana has also abandoned the Common Core, but the state’s on-time graduation rate is 6 precentage points higher than the national average.

The problem extends nationally. Only 72 percent of economically disadvantaged students graduated high school on time in the 2011-2012 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. A mere 80 percent of students nationally graduate on time. (New Jersey is higher than average, where 86 percent of students graduate on time.)

Are those diplomas even significant, when compared to academic achievements of students across the globe?

The United States ranked 27th out of 34 countries in 2012 for mathemetics when measured by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).

Here’s a quote from PISA’s summary on the United States[2]: “Students in the United States have particular weaknesses in performing mathematics tasks with higher cognitive demands, such as taking real-world situations, translating them into mathematical terms, and interpreting mathematical aspects in real-world problems. An alignment study between the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and PISA suggests that a successful implementation of the Common Core Standards would yield significant performance gains also in PISA.”

Few would argue that increasing academic rigor is essential to the future survival of the nation.

Public schools must be held accountable, to some degree, for the level of education provided there. Since many schools have so far failed to provide sufficiently challenging classwork on their own, it’s understandable that politicians have inserted themselves into the process.

Now, states are left to decide whether Common Core is the best path forward.

But instead of having a real plan for improving student achievement, Oklahoma and South Carolina have quit.

By quitting the Common Core, are these states going to slide back into habits that discourage their students’ future success?